January 17, 2013

Around the dial

AtClassic Film and TV Cafe, Rick has a rundown of TV Westerns from A to Z. It's interesting that, though I've never considered myself a Western "fan" per se, I have a lot of them in my collection - Have Gun - Will Travel, Wyatt Earp, Maverick, The Restless Gun, Wanted: Dead or Alive. Some of the appeal lies in the stars (Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Boone), and the stories are generally quite well-written, but I love the titles. I mean, Wanted: Dead or Alive! Have Gun - Will Travel! You know those shows mean business!

Remember Charo? (Hint: if you ever saw her, you'd remember her.) Michael's TV Tray does, and it's a reminder of how strange and fleeting the nature of celebrity is. Boy, Xavier Cugat had good taste in wives, didn't he?

Happy New Year! As far as I'm concerned, it's still not too late to say it, and at Christmas TV History, Joanna does it well with this retrospective of the Ellery Queen New Year's Eve mystery. I've read a lot of the books in addition to having the complete series on DVD, and while Jim Hutton may not exactly fit Ellery on the written page, he gets the spirit absolutely right. This show is great fun if you've never seen it.

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And just a reminder that the Classic TV Variety Blogathon starts on February 3, and yours truly will be there writing about the King of Cool, Dean Martin, and his great 60s show. Here's the rest of the schedule:

I was going to say something perfunctory about "I'm really looking forward to reading about..." and then I realized I'm looking forward to all of these! I'm not sure there's any genre more foreign to today's young viewers than the variety show, so you won't want to miss it.

1 comment:

Thank you for linking to my blog. I grew up in ECAC country and also found the occasional national ACC games to be fascinating. I recall being riveted by the 1974 ACC tournament championship game (NC State over Maryland in OT) which was televised in NY. Maybe I will make that the subject of a future blog post.